Fiona Grant 804
“Am I Blue?” Blog Post
I
recently read “Am I Blue?” a short story by Bruce Coville about a 16-year old
boy named Vince, trying to figure out whether he is gay or not, and learning to
accept people for who they are on the inside. When I first read “Am I Blue?” I
noticed Vince was pretty uncomfortable for most of the story, even when it
seemed that everything was going fine. After re-reading and annotating many
times, I made a double mountain and realized that the internal and external conflict
don’t add up. The external conflict gets resolved simply and quickly, whereas
the internal conflict takes time and is more complicated to resolve.
The
external conflict begins when Vince meets Melvin and goes to the café. The
rising action identifies the conflict, when Melvin is explaining his purpose to
Vince. This leads to Vince acquiring the “sight”, which is the climax. The
falling action includes Vince at home, calling a homophobic politician and
in-the-closet gay, a hypocrite, implying Vince is forming opinions based on his
feelings. The resolution follows Vince wishing for “Blue Day” and saving his
last and third wish. You can tell Vince changes from being nervous and a bit
ashamed in the exposition, to wanting to help other gays be who they are all the time, because of his reactions
to Melvin’s actions, and by sacrificing his wish to aid others.
The
internal conflict is introduced when Vince feels embarrassed and afraid of
being seen with Melvin for fear of getting beat up. The rising action bubbles
to the surface as Vince starts panicking over the fact that he may be gay
because Melvin is his fairy godfather. Fast forward to the climax, which is
more spread out than other points on the plot mountain, when Vince uses his
second wish on blue day to aid others who may be confused, embarrassed, or even
homophobic. The falling action follows with Vince using his third wish to turn
Butch Carrigan blue. By wishing for this I think he is giving Butch a second
chance and forgiving him for being so cruel, and he’s also doing him a favor by
showing him he’s gay, and by showing him that it’s okay. The resolution is a
big moment of character change, when Vince saves his last wish for when he
meets his soul mate, and implies that it doesn’t matter what gender your soul
mate is, as long as you love them and they love you, that’s all that matters.
If you look at the external climax, when Vince acquires the “sight”, and the
internal climax, when Vince uses his second wish for blue day, they don’t occur
at the same part of the story. The external climax comes earlier than the
internal climax, which makes me think that sometimes things on the outside,
like character change, occur, but really aren’t completely resolved until
around the falling action or so.
I can connect this to life, because
a lot of people go through life pretending that everything is fine, when it’s
really not. If we had no insight to what Vince’s thoughts and emotions were,
we’d assume that by the time Vince got the “sight”, that he was fully acceptant
of himself, everyone else, and understood what it meant to be gay. Since we do
know what he’s thinking, we can conclude that the internal conflict is more
complicated, and therefore takes longer to resolve. For example, when Vince is
considering blue day while he’s brushing his teeth, he says, “Yet if I did it,
nothing would ever be the same.” This shows the readers that things weren’t
completely resolved before then, if things could still resort back to normal
before he wished for blue day. I can connect this to myself, because when I
struggle with a class, one good grade on a test isn’t going to magically bring
my average to a 100, it takes a lot of studying and hard work. Vince getting
the “sight” was like getting a good grade on a test, getting the sight wasn’t
going to miraculously help him answer the question of whether he was gay or
not, or help him accept it. It took some thought and more use of the “sight” to
help him come to the decision to wish for blue day.
To conclude, the exposition and
rising action of both the internal and external conflict seem to be in sync, up
until the climax, where the external conflict continues and is equally spread
out, and the internal conflict’s falling and resolution is closely knit and
farther away from the climax. I think this is a very relatable short story,
even for people who are not gay, because you can apply accepting and respecting
people’s opinions to everyday situations, even if they aren’t about being gay
or not. I really enjoyed this short story, and I would recommend it to any
student from 6th grade and up, so that they can fully understand the
themes. Overall, I think this is a funny, and very purposeful short story.
